If you're super sensitive to the idea of male/male child rape and prostitution, then you may want to skip reading this post. Banana Fish always portrays these topics in a severe, negative light, never a positive one, but it is a prevalent theme throughout the series. For me, this is what sets this series apart from claims that it's a precursor to the Boy's Love Japanese genre. In that genre, rape is an acceptable means to an end, as if you can force your victim to fall in love by showing him how pleasurable male/male sex is by doing it against his will. Here, rape is rape, always negative, and it destroys the dignity and self-worth of the victim.
Soft-spoken and shy, 19-year-old Eiji Okumura is an assistant photographer and when he and his boss (senpai/teacher) travel from Japan to New York for some interviews, Eiji meets 17-year-old gang boss Ash Lynx for the first time. Ash's last name is absolutely accurate. Devastatingly handsome with blonde hair and green eyes, Ash is solitary, lithe, and graceful, and there's an instant zing between Ash and Eiji. Whether it's a sexual zing or not is up to the viewer, I suppose, but what I saw was much more of souls connecting and gender didn't matter because sex didn't play into it. I've seen it before, people making instant connections and it's always fascinated me how they're able to do that. It can take me years to let someone in, and it literally takes Ash a couple of weeks to tell Eiji his darkest secrets.
Ash is seventeen when he and Eiji first meet and there's a telling moment for why Ash connects so strongly with Eiji. Eiji is the first person who helped Ash without wanting something (a.k.a. sexual favors) in return. First raped at the tender age of seven, Ash killed his rapist with a gun when he was eight. Kidnapped somewhere along the way, forced into kiddie porn movies, and then becoming the highest priced male prostitute for a sickening crime boss named Papa Dino, Ash has had probably the most rotten life imaginable. Sex is a weapon and a tool for him. In that regard, I agree with the author of the series in that Ash is asexual by choice because of his circumstances. For Ash, intimacy is being able to bare his soul to someone that isn't going to look at him in disgust and it has nothing to do with sex.
That someone is Eiji. I love Eiji. He is compassionate, funny and loyal to a boy he's only just met but instinctively knows needs him more than he's ever been needed before in his life. Is Eiji weak? Yes, very. He's not violent. His innocence and naivete put himself and Ash in danger on countless occasions. He's an introverted Japanese boy way out of his depth in New York City fighting the mafia. And he's emotionally connected with a dangerous gang boss. That's pretty scary stuff, but he's also the only one in Ash's life who likes Ash for who he is and genuinely wants to help him without needing or wanting anything in return but to stay by his side. Ash doesn't need a romantic partner. He needs a best friend.
During the course of this anime, Ash loses the two people he cared about most in the world, both murdered in front of him, one by his own hand because he had no other choice. To the guys in his gang, he's the boss, not a friend. They trust him, but he scares them. Eiji is all he has left, the only chance he has to laugh and cry, to share good memories and bad memories, and to try to cling to the reality that he's not a monster. If someone so purely good and kind like Eiji can genuinely love him, then there must be something there worth loving, something that hasn't been completely blackened by his wretched life and the abuse he's suffered.
I've already cried over Ash numerous times while watching Banana Fish. I'm a devout proponent of child protection. It's actually a part of my job so I take it very seriously. Watching Banana Fish has reminded me that there are so many children and teenagers who are in sexually abusive situations right now, made worse in many ways because of COVID-19, and the inability to get out and away from the abuser. It infuriates me, the helplessness that I feel watching Banana Fish, knowing that there are real people who are undergoing similar experiences.
Evil takes on many faces in the world and we don't always recognize them. It's a slow infiltration into society, brought on by lust and perversion. These are human beings and they deserve to live a life free from abuse, where they feel safe, warm and cared for. For those watching or reading Banana Fish, never forget that Ash Lynx is a sexually abused child who had to learn to be good at the game in order to survive.
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| Eiji comforting Ash after Ash endured a horrible nightmare |
At one point, Ash has been recaptured by Papa Dino, but he's so physically sick at heart that he can't eat so he's being kept alive through an IV. When Papa Dino tells him that he's going to adopt Ash as his son, Ash falls into a fit of hysterical, insane laughing. And he proceeds to tell Dino exactly how he feels when he's forced to have sex, how worthless and humiliating it is, and how he is simply a human version of a toilet for the men that use him. It's the first time Ash actually makes a verbal plea to his abuser for his right to live with dignity. Ash's statement is so visually disgusting that Dino may have actually felt some small sense of guilt because he slaps Ash and then proceeds to punch him, his favorite toy, his pride and joy, until he's almost unconscious. Did he suddenly see the blonde, green-eyed boy as human instead of a possession and resent that crack in his belief system? Maybe.
As the story progresses, Ash goes longer and longer between sexual encounters and when the last one happens near the end of the series after he's been captured by a truly evil man that is not Papa Dino, he's really fighting against being sexually dominated. But his rapist knows all the triggers, the touches, the manipulations to bring Ash under his power and control. The body is a funny thing. It has muscle memory, good and bad, and Ash's body has been pre-conditioned and groomed from the age of a young child to accept male to male sex and to find pleasure in it, even if his mind is screaming against it. This is what repetitive rapists use against their victims. Because the victim feels pleasure, they must want it, and that has never been shown as more of a lie than in Banana Fish. After the rape, Ash is physically shaking from the shock, disgusted with his physical response, and emotionally in shreds. Eiji comes and holds him after this happens, a gentle touch from the only friend who Ash has truly bared his heart to about how ugly it feels for him to be raped. Ash's is an ugly and tragic life, and very real. Sexual abuse is not something to be taken lightly or to romanticize.
Do I believe Ash is homosexual? Does it actually matter? Any child who has been repetitively raped from the time he was 7-years-old has no notion of what his true sexual inclination might be. That side of him has been warped and shredded by evil men. We do know that when Ash was fourteen, he liked a girl a lot, and she was murdered because of his preference for her. What I see in Ash and Eiji is almost a sibling relationship. Ash even calls him older brother and that's rather telling. Ash has longed for comfort and connection for so long and Eiji has the remarkable ability to give him that. They are intimate in a soul-baring, comforting kind of way, but it never feels sexual to me. Why should it? After the life Ash has lead, why would he find any joy or pleasure in sex or even be able to trust himself that what he was feeling wasn't simply a groomed bodily response? Emotions he can trust, physical pleasure, no.
Banana Fish wrecked me. I've never read the manga, but I hear the anime is pretty darn close and ends the same way as the manga, and that's what breaks my heart into a million pieces. Eiji and Ash's friendship was meant to last for years, until they were both old and grey, still able to laugh with one another and share the deepest, darkest parts of themselves. I hate the ending. I don't think it's what Ash would have done, after everything the audience has come to know about him through the course of the story, his sheer stubbornness and will to survive. But I still love the entirety of the program, ending aside. This is the most powerful anime I have ever seen, and it lends a very loud voice against child pornography and prostitution.
Banana Fish is available to stream for free with English subs on Amazon Prime.
Content: The program is violent and bloody with countless deaths by gunshot or knife with blood-splatter (Ash is a killer and many of the deaths are at his hand), has several uses of sh*t, a couple of instances of fade in/fade out male rape (thank goodness we're not subjected to actually watching it), a couple of attempts at male rape that fail, several scenes of pedophilic tendencies and inferences, and a couple of same-sex male kisses (one between Eiji and Ash when Ash slips him a message in a pill casing using the kiss as the means of transport, and a couple that are forced between Ash and his abusers).
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